AltSci Cell

Human Resources is a tricky business. There are two goals involved:
1) Expansion of business capabilities (two coders produce more code than one)
2) Cheaper completion of goals (a cheaper coder who does the same work saves
money)

Finding a person who fits these requires time and effort. If a person doesn't
work out, the effort is lost. The effort is usually an initial training period.
Because of the specialization of tasks, a person with very deep knowledge about
a few things is actually less useful than a person with broad knowledge and a
keen sense for problem solving. Problem solving is usually thought of as a game
skill, however in business, problem solving is essential to both businessperson
and engineer. The businessperson needs problemsolving to ensure that business
goals are met using all the non-technical methods available to him/her. The
engineer on the other hand needs problemsolving to solve individual tasks as
efficiently as possible. An engineer that wastes time when s/he is unable to
finish a specific task is worse than an engineer that wastes other people's
time asking questions to solve a difficult problem. Thus, social skills are
also necessary for all but the best engineer. An engineer who has perfect
problemsolving skills doesn't need any social skills, but engineering tasks are
often so difficult that it practically requires more than one person to solve.
However, an engineer that continually asks questions and wastes others time is
not an engineer at all. You see in the equation below, the HR benefit of an
engineer who has someone do all his/her work is below zero.

Why is Twitter useful? Twitter is a service that encourages people to post
messages to those people who value their contributions. Who values your
contributions? Your family and friends. If you are celebrity, you have a number
of fans that you don't know who value your contribution. Each person on Twitter
has an incentive to post useful information in a usable way. If they do not
post useful information, people will stop valuing their contributions. So we
get a system of people providing useful information free of charge to anyone
who follows them. Bam, instantly millions of people are talking publicly.

This is quite similar to MySpace or Facebook (except that facebook is
completely private and myspace is partially private and a few other things).
The issues with Facebook and MySpace is that it's design is different. Status
messages on these services are practically useless and are not properly
broadcast to people who care. Facebook has put a lot of work into changing that
but instead they made it complex enough and the UI is poor enough to dissuade
people from posting stuff like what they are doing after work. You don't want
to discuss stuff with facebook's UI. Twitter is capable of merging the UI of an
instant message client into a website that acts like a thousand chatrooms. But the
awesome difference is that instead of ignoring all the idiots in a chatroom,
you get to pick and choose who you actually want to listen to at your
prerogative.

Hooray!
The Twitter Language AI is ready to be used! How do you use it? Type a word
into the input box, then click "Search". This will search Twitter for that
word. It will return the last 15 results and histogram all the words it finds.
This is very simple functionality, right? Why would someone want a histogram of
words spoken on a topic? For one, market research. If you know the word that
people associate with your brand or topic, you can market it using their words.
Yowch, that's almost like advertising, isn't it? Yup. The actual original
purpose for this was to learn foreign languages by translating the most common
words first (similar to my Japanese Language AI). The second interesting thing
to do with the Twitter Language AI is to click the "Graph" button. This will
take the data in the left and graph it on the right as shown in the image.
This is really interesting and useful for scientists who don't want to import
the data into a spreadsheet just to graph it. It uses the Google Visualization
API and sends no data to Google (just your IP address and HTTP headers) to draw
this, which is pretty cool.